Damascus Gate , by Robert Stone. Houghton Mifflin, 500 pages, $26.
A few pages into Damascus Gate , you may find yourself wondering why it took Robert Stone so long to set a novel in Israel. Often, in the past, Mr. Stone has seemed rather like the literary reincarnation of some early Church Father (though without the primitive theologians’ nutty misogyny or life-denying asceticism) working out a thorny Gnostic dialectic or mystical dilemma disguised as political thriller and spiked by massive doses of mind-altering drugs and creepy psycho violence.
Now, this complex, brilliant new book-about the volatile chemistry of messianic and territorial passions percolating in Jerusalem and erupting in the camps and settlements of Gaza-allows us to watch one of the finest writers track his obsessions back to their primal sources and edge them toward an explosive, near-apocalyptic conclusion. Mr. Stone’s fascination with first principles-with the ways in which God and the Devil, faith and doubt, exalted states of consciousness and pharmaceutical damage operate in the arenas of international and personal crises-has never been more intensely explored or more essential to the narrative than here, in his most powerful and accomplished novel.
Raised in Washington Heights, on the unstable edge between the Boho demimonde and academic respectability, Chris Lucas, the novel’s protagonist, is a man accustomed, by nature and profession, to watching from the margins. A freelance writer, author of a less-than-wildly-successful book on the U.S. invasion of Grenada, he’s drifted over to Israel, presumably in search of an engaging journalistic subject. Encouraged by a Jerusalem psychiatrist, he agrees to co-author a study of local cults and of the Holy Land’s magnetic attraction for religious seekers in various states of psychic disarray. Soon, however, we realize that this seemingly casual decision has, in fact, been motivated by an enormous personal urgency. Half-Jewish, half-Christian, Lucas is profoundly conflicted about who he is, and what he believes; it’s no accident that he’s gravitated to the part of the world where ideas of faith and identity matter most deeply and most dangerously. Throughout the novel, Lucas is repeatedly asked his religion, a question that he keeps answering in different ways, depending on the interlocutor, the circumstances and his state of relative calm, depression or warranted fear.
Impotent, more or less alcoholic, rootless and confused, Lucas becomes our still point of sanity amid the whirling, mad, cacophonous bazaar of Middle Eastern intrigue. The novel’s dozens of major and minor players include an impressive range of seekers and con men, secular and spiritual hustlers with a financial stake in the coming millennium, crazed archeologists, false messiahs, mental patients, double agents, Communist agitators masquerading as human rights activists, junkie musicians dabbling in the occult, Mossad operatives, right-wing rabbis, Russian mafiosi and American diplomats.
What they have in common is that almost none of them are what they seem to be; and what divides them is not so much national or religious differences as the unbridgeable chasm between skeptics and true believers, regardless of whether they believe in Gnostic dualism or the Marxist dialectic. We’re introduced to the small army of characters gradually enough-and they’re each drawn fully enough-for us to keep everyone straight, until a series of revelations about hidden loyalties, buried pasts and unpredictable interconnections force us to struggle slightly for balance as the narrative ground keeps shifting, and shifting again, beneath us.
Mr. Stone does the things he’s always done well, writing snappy, convincing dialogue capacious enough to leave room for the book’s numerous loonies to go off on breathtaking or tiresome rants and tirades. He’s excellent at creating menace, personified in the kind of mercenary sleaze you least want to meet in a bar in a foreign city, or in a growing sense of threat spread more widely over scenes in which mobs are engaged in mindless, chaotic, terrifying violence. He has a good eye for the local detail that convinces us we’re in the hands of a guide who knows the territory and is actually capable of observing and thinking at the same time. Here, for example, Lucas watches a quick, telling interchange between a demented street crazy and a Muslim priest: “The majnoon went out from the shop and smiled his Jerry Lewis smile on the young mullah and kissed him. A biblical kiss, Lucas thought. The mullah beamed and glanced at Lucas to see if the foreigner had seen, in turn, the tenderness, the compassion. Life was so self-conscious in Jerusalem, so lived at close quarters, by competing moralizers. Every little blessing demanded immediate record.”
The writing is often energized by a dry, smart-ass humor that barely conceals the spiritual unease beneath: “As Lucas understood it, the Rapture, when it came, would be distinctly cinematic. The returned Christ would gather up his own. The upgathering would be of a literal nature. One of these mornings, in order to be spared the final trials, the born-again … would be rapted, like cosmic chipmunks in the talons of the savior, drawn irresistibly heavenward into the Everlasting Arm. Godly motorists would be wafted from the controls of their cars. Since born-again Christians tended to be concentrated in states with high speed limits, things would get ugly.” And when the characters start raving on about the cabala, Sufi masters, history’s great false messiahs and true prophets, then you can feel the writer having fun, slinging the mystical bullshit while seriously contemplating the gravest metaphysical questions: our hope of ever knowing the truth, and what it means to believe.
The plots and subplots are, so to speak, Byzantine; the narrative-part of which involves a plot to blow up Jerusalem’s holy sites-keeps twisting, and taking sharp, disorienting turns. In fact, something about Damascus Gate makes one realize that a complicated and engrossing plot (now that having any sort of plot at all is, of course, entirely optional) can be a gesture of generosity, of kindness toward the reader. Plotted novels do allow for the possibility that the reader may not be propelled through a long book purely by the brilliance of the writer’s mind, the sensitivity and accuracy of the writer’s perceptions, or the force of the writer’s language. The distractible or burdened reader may require more common, vulgar inducements-for example, curiosity about what’s going to happen next.
Damascus Gate keeps our attention riveted on the page; there’s a lot at stake here, and by the final chapters, the tension’s fairly extreme. And what more could one ask for, really? A well-written and moving narrative by an author with an interesting mind, fiction that combines the pleasures of a thriller with those of a novel of ideas, a book we read so avidly that we may not realize until later how much, of great importance, Damascus Gate is about.
